The trust of patients and subjects is an essential prerequisite for the success of medical research projects, which cannot be conducted without the collection, long-term storage, and analysis of clinical data and samples. Today, medical research predominantly operates in increasingly larger collaborative networks. Consequently, the importance of data protection and data security is also growing. In 2003, the TMF published generic data protection concepts for medical research networks for the first time, coordinated with the data protection officers of the federal and state governments, and made available to the research community. Based on this, numerous research projects were able to develop and coordinate their data protection concepts more quickly, also with the assistance of the TMF's Data Protection Working Group. The experiences gained in this process are important.